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This chapter focuses on ways of giving voice to the survivors of institutional abuse and how their contribution can be capitalised in raising community awareness of this phenomenon. The collection of testimonies demonstrates that institutional abuse is a common and widespread phenomenon that in most cases remains unrevealed throughout the life course. The participatory research process we describe is part of an important social and clinical intervention developed in the framework of two projects. The chapter illustrates outputs and outcomes related to disclosure of institutional abuse and its long-term consequences, as well as the meaning and implications of collective trauma. Results confirm the need to promote the voice of survivors to build a new professional and community culture and sensitisation towards children's right to be heard as an essential instrument to prevent and detect institutional ill treatment. Participatory processes can overcome the resistance of individuals, professional communities and politicians to recognising the phenomenon, emphasising institutional responsibilities and the specific effects of a serious form of maltreatment that requires extraordinary and specific interventions in terms of intensity and flexibility. This chapter describes a fieldwork and research experience made possible thanks to a strong alliance with survivors who engaged in a process of reflection and theoretical elaboration that generated both social and clinical impacts.

Since the reforms started in the Romanian child protection, and in spite of adopting children’s rights, and investing in the professionalization of the child protection staff, research has indicated that children continue to suffer violence in care settings.

This chapter contributes to the literature that documents children’s rights violations in Romanian residential care, before and after the political shift in 1989, including the period after the accession to the EU, by presenting and discussing interview data of 48 adults who spent parts of their childhoods in child protection settings.

The conceptual framework of this analysis is based on the human rights perspective and the transitional justice. The main body of the article presents the testimonials of adults who grew up in institutional care in Romania, as collected in the framework of the SASCA project, funded by the European Union. ¹

This chapter explores what it means for adults to claim child rights. Focussing on activism against institutional child abuse, it considers the question of what happens to the mobilisation of child rights discourse when the person claiming those rights is no longer a child. In other words, how is the concept of child rights used retrospectively and what does this reveal, both about childhood and about child rights? The chapter begins with the contention that childhood needs to be understood as not only a concept that speaks to the lives of children, their experiences, and their place within the social structure. Rather, we suggest that a more expansive view enables recognition of the enduring significance of childhood in adults’ lives. We illustrate this argument with examples of the formation of collective identities based on childhood experiences, before turning to the ways that child rights are marshalled by adults in activism, in commissions of inquiry, and in the legal sphere. Throughout the chapter, we consider issues of temporality. We explore the ways in which adult survivors of childhood abuse retrospectively claim rights denied to them in the past and we examine how activism, official inquiries, and legal mechanisms position adults in relation to their childhood selves. We then consider some of the dilemmas that arise with retrospective rights claims; particularly questions of retroactivity in relation to responsibility and redress for past abuse. Finally, we explore the temporal repositioning of childhood and how past and present is bridged. This occurs through survivor activism and, in more formal mechanisms such as inquiries, by focussing on how people are represented as child victims in the past and survivors in the present.

Since 1980s, institutional child sexual abuse has been ‘discovered’ as an internationally recognisable social problem. Public inquiries have become the most dominant mode of response to this, having been enacted throughout much of the western world. Driven by demands from victims/survivors for collective recognition, these have drawn on features of transitional justice as an important means of truth telling. While the role of survivors in precipitating the enactment of public inquiries has been well documented, less well understood is how social activism has been influenced in the aftermath of such inquiries. In this chapter, the authors explore a local phenomenon known as Loud Fence that arose in the Australian town of Ballarat as a case study to consider the relationship between activism and social change that can occur in the wake of official truth telling.

The purpose of this study is to build on previous literature in this area thus, the views of professionals working with those who report institutional abuse was sought using a Delphi method.

Professionals working with those who report institutional abuse, such as psychologists, social workers and personal injury lawyers, were invited to engage in the Delphi study. Sixteen professionals completed the final round (with four rounds in total). This method was used to gain professional consensus on the considered impacts of institutional child abuse and what factors influence impacts.

Eight superordinate themes were developed, as follows: institutional abuse has lasting negative effects on well-being, functioning and behaviour; loss of trust in others and the system is a potential outcome of institutional abuse; negative impacts on future life chances; negative impacts of institutional abuse are exacerbated by numerous factors; protective factors reduced negative impacts; psychological intervention is useful for survivors; positive and negative impacts of disclosure – the response of others as important; and keep impacts individualised.

The need for an individualised approach when working with those reporting institutional abuse was a salient finding.

Institutional abuse is known to result in several negative impacts, although research into this area is limited with a need to better understand what may protect or exacerbate impacts.

In this chapter, the authors focus on a range of Australian news articles selected for their relevance to key themes in the area of child abuse and examine two high profile cases of child abuse deaths that were extensively reported on by the media and led to system reform. Challenges for media reporting on child abuse in Australia including a changing media landscape, lack of available child abuse data and lack of publicly available serious case reviews are discussed. The authors argue that there is a need for attention to be paid to children's resistance and agency in the context of violence and abuse to counter the objectification of children and uphold their rights. Following Finkelhor (2008), the authors argue that media reporting on child abuse in Australia reflects a general approach to child abuse that is fragmented, with different types of abuse viewed as separate from one another, and call for a more integrated understanding of child abuse. The authors highlight the complexity of media responses to child abuse in Australia, noting that while the social problem of child abuse can be misrepresented by the media, media reporting has also triggered significant systemic reform and advocated for children in cases where other systems failed them.

In the century from 1868 to 1969, over 105,000 children were detained in industrial schools in Ireland, having been committed by the courts. The purpose of this paper is to examine, and offer suggestions regarding the contexts of the peer physical and sexual abuse and bullying that went on in the industrial schools.

This paper draws on the accounts of survivors, the results of research conducted by academics and journalists and recent reports compiled by legislative enquiries into industrial schools in Ireland, with particular reference being made to the the six industrial schools run by the Christian Brothers.

The specific parameters of how the industrial school system developed in Ireland rendered detainees powerless and voiceless, and these factors also facilitated the physical and sexual abuse of child and adolescent detainees by adults in this institutions. Serious instances of peer physical and sexual abuse also went on in these schools. It is argued that such patterns of peer abuse are best understood as occurring within the psychosocial contexts of primary adjustment, collaboration and re-enactment.

It is suggested that the context of peer abuse in institutions is important for researchers and practitioners to attend to.

The realities of life in industrial schools in Ireland has been slow to emerge, due to the secrecy with which those institutions have been surrounded. Most accounts have focused on abuse at the hands of adults; this examines peer abuse in those institutions in context.

Westbrook Farm Home for Boys in Queensland, Australia, existed in various forms for over 100 years. As such, it offers a valuable window into Australian approaches to managing and reforming boys through the twentieth century. The purpose of this paper is to examine its approach to reforming teenage boys during a period marked by a mass escape in 1961. It argues that the reformatory education initially intended was no longer tenable during this moment in history, and that this period represents a breakdown of that approach.

This paper draws on material including newspaper reports, memoirs, and the report of an inquiry into an escape by inmates in 1961. These are analysed in order to construct a picture of the type of reformatory education during this period and the public and official responses to this.

Westbrook Farm Home for Boys was, during this period, an institution attempting to provide a reformatory education at a historical moment when such an education was no longer viewed as appropriate means of addressing the criminal behaviour of youths. This, combined with the leadership of a domineering figure in Superintendent Roy Golledge, led to a culture of abuse, rather than education. The uncovering of this culture was a pivotal moment in the transition of Westbrook into an institution explicitly dealing with criminal youths.

No academic work relating to this moment in Westbrook’s history has been previously published.

In May 2012, nine men from the Rochdale area of Manchester were found guilty of sexually exploiting a number of underage girls. Reporting on the trial, the media focussed on the fact that eight of the nine men were of Pakistani origin, while the girls were all white. It also framed similar cases in Preston, Rotherham, Derby, Shropshire, Oxford, Telford and Middlesbrough as ethnically motivated, thus creating a moral panic centred on South Asian grooming gangs preying on white girls. Despite the lack of evidence that the abuse perpetrated by some Asian men is distinct from male violence against women generally, the media focus on the grooming gang cases has constructed a narrative in which South Asian men pose a unique sexual threat to white girls. This process of ‘othering’ South Asian men in terms of abusive behaviour masks the fact that in the United Kingdom, the majority of sexual and physical abuse is perpetrated by white men; it simultaneously marginalises the sexual and domestic violence experienced by black and minority ethnic women. Indeed, the sexual abuse of South Asian women and girls is invisibilised within this binary discourse, despite growing concerns and evidence that the men who groomed the young girls in the aforementioned cases had also perpetrated domestic and sexual violence in their homes against their wives/partners. Through discourse analysis of newspaper coverage of these cases for the period 2012‒2018, this paper examines the British media's portrayal of South Asian men – particularly Pakistani men – in relation to child-grooming offences and explores the conditions under which ‘South Asian men’ have been constructed as ‘folk devils’. It also highlights the comparatively limited newspaper coverage of the abuse experiences and perspectives of Asian women and girls from the same communities to emphasise that violence against women and girls remains an ongoing problem across the nation.